SOURCE: "Alice Walker's Vision of the South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland," in African American Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 192-204.

In the following essay, Butler discusses Walker's complicated portrayal of the South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in which she uses each life to show a different aspect of the South.

Two-heading was dying out, he lamented. "Folks what can look at things in more than one way is done got rare."

In "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience," Alice Walker defines her response to the South in a richly ambivalent way. Although she stresses that she does not intend to "romanticize Southern black country life" and is quick to point out that she "hated" the South, "generally," when growing up in rural Georgia, she nevertheless emphasizes that Southern black writers have "enormous richness and beauty to draw from." This "double vision...